Missing Pieces, Part II

The nature of the response to the first post under this title was such that I think there is real value in it. Examples drawn from life apparently say more and go further than any form of prescription or wit on the part of yours truly. If we all think about it, I’m sure we can come up with many examples of the tragically flawed in our lives, and upon reflecting on those flaws we perhaps better understand ourselves as we are, or as we would like to be.

Between the ages of about 5 and 13 my neighbour was a man I shall call Thomas. He lived with his wife and his Old English sheep dog, apparently in quiet suburban boredom, just like everyone else. He washed his car; he went to work; he mowed his lawn; he entertained – or endured – his wife’s parents, and her brother, every weekend; he walked the dog; he grew a beard; he washed his car… Once he had a knee operation to fix a cartilage problem. For six weeks in a cast he struggled with bucket and sponge, lawn mower and hound. But then all went back to normal.

After a few years a baby was born, just as you’d expect. His wife’s parents, and her brother, now visited more often, and he struggled to establish any paternal or familial status for himself. Things deteriorated. His wife suffered from post-natal depression, which neither of them understood, and about which neither of them knew how to ask for help. Thomas began to doubt his own worth: what was the meaning of this life, with its dark loveless procession of in-laws, works and days? He started to drink. My brother saw him at lunchtime one day, parked in his car in a layby drinking Tennant’s Super. The pain was to be numbed, one way or another. I watched with childlike fascination as this well-meaning but ultimately lost man fell apart. He came home from work one day and hid a plastic bag full of beer cans within our compost heap. His escape from the problem had now become the problem, the identification of which covered over the real issues – depression, family, fatherhood, boredom. Alcoholism tends to be treated as an evil in its own right, but often, as in this case, it is merely a symptom. To treat it without treating the underlying cause is futile.

Another evening: this time he arrived home already three sheets to the wind, and found himself locked out. He banged on front door and back, urinated against the side of the house, and then banged on the doors some more. Eventually she let him in, but it was now clear that his alcoholism had made her afraid – afraid of the animal in the man, the brute that all of us carry and suppress. No longer coherent, and no longer strong enough to be human, with all the sensibilities and sensitivities that guide our relations, he succumbed through alcohol to the bare beast.

A few days later an ambulance arrived in the morning and took him away in a wheelchair. He was ashen, resigned, a wreck. He died of septicaemia within a day or two. He was 34. His wife, when asked how she was, said it was ‘a relief’. Her son was raised by her and her brother, who moved in and took over the washing of the car and the mowing of the lawn. Thomas’ life insurance paid off the mortgage.

Missing Pieces

I used to be somebody’s boss. I was a friend too, in that mitigated way that befalls the manager and the managed. He said I was the best boss he’d ever had. He was ten years older than me. He was clinically depressed. He was probably a genius. For one reason or another, he came up in conversation recently, and I was given pause to think why this man was, in most respects, an abject failure as a man. Let us call him Sebastian.

Sebastian had somewhat miraculously survived a rain of arrows, but the course of life had left him scarred. His father left in early childhood, occasionally reappearing to open up old wounds. At thirteen or so his mother committed suicide, and the ensuing years were dogged by shadowy thoughts and dark depressions. Institutionalised for a time, he never again could entirely break free from the shackles of guilt, anguish, and deep pain. Lacking a father figure, or any strong character to guide him, he floundered through adolescence, emerging as a peculiar and singular adult.

He was educated, by virtue of a scholarship, at a famous Northern English public school (for North American readers, that means he was among the elite). Without much effort, he mastered the classics, and saw life as the endless re-telling and re-working of those fundamental ideas and plotlines. Existence, for him, lacked the joyous sense of the discovery of the new. Everything had already been said. The creative instinct had died shortly before he was born, and this was to him the tragedy of his timing. He obsessed about the lives of Picasso and Bob Dylan, as if they were the last humans to signal new directions. When he experienced their art, it was not to him a joy, but a lament. Humanity had peaked, and he had missed it.

Most people found him impossible to engage in conversation, for he could not abide small talk, and he heard little else. If you could engage him, you would find him in deadly earnest, and should you approach him intellectually he would stop in his tracks at the wonderment of a mind worthy of his contemplation. On the whole, he was an intellectual recluse, unfit for society as he saw it (essentially an uncivilised place). He had a pathological fear of the exhaust fumes of motor vehicles, causing him to cross all roads with wanton abandon for his life and limbs. He could not enter parts of the city where cars went, and would not wait on the kerb for anything. Our walks together were curious, for he knew every route that kept him out harm’s way. And yet he smoked incessantly. He told me he was aware of the inconsistency, and that it was his problem.

His home was a scantily furnished hovel, bedecked with books and LPs. The sky-rise towers of tomes, on every seat and every square inch of hidden carpet, were interleaved with scraps of paper, marking his place in each. For all of these books were being read and re-read. He wrote songs lamenting lost love – he had loved only once, and she had absconded with a Welshman – and sang them to himself. I told him, jokingly, that his was the pyrrhic victory, since the reward for her cruelty had been the Welsh. He took me very seriously, and brightened for a moment.

Toward the end of my relationship with Sebastian, just prior to circumstances throwing me upon the world in a new way, he broached the topic of his father. He said that he had come to the conclusion that his father was a bastard while he was shaving. Nobody, he reflected, had taught him how to shave, and in his mid-thirties he was only just realising that he had always done it badly: trivial, perhaps, but also the thin end of the wedge. Here stood a man, broken in spirit and suspicious of his fellow man, acknowledging that he was only partly formed. Formal education had opened to him the power of thought, but the lack of informal guidance had left him stranded, and all too aware of the impossibility of recovery.

Sebastian had been the innocent victim of the lives of others, and the aloofness of the safety net. He had not fallen and failed as a man, but he had been failed as a boy. In my naiveté I had tried to find ways to direct him, to encourage him, to thrust him into the light. But I was no antidote for a fear instilled in formative years, and I was not then a teacher. The manly man is never timid, I have said, and so say again. We must also, however, be the enemies of fear, and guard against its installation. Without shaping, without careful guidance, without ideas of the men boys should come to be, we risk the emergence of men like Sebastian: men whose heads knew of the good, but whose hearts had never felt it.

Go Climb a Rock

Climbing is the best possible physical developer of nerve and muscle and endurance. A good rock climber cannot be a weakling (Baden-Powell, Rovering to Success).

We could dwell for many an hour on the life and works of Lord Robert Baden-Powell of Gilwell, founder of the Scout movement, hero of Mafeking, and teacher of youth. Strange to say, but Baden-Powell’s book detailing the rocks that will hinder the boy’s passage into manhood has not lodged so firmly into the popular consciousness as his Scouting for Boys. Sure, it sold a canoe-full of copies, but I suspect not many fathers will be giving Rovering to Success: A Guide for Young Manhood to their budding sons. More is the pity, for despite its antiquated style, it still has much to offer.

The ‘rutting season’ was a principal concern of Baden-Powell’s guide to becoming manly. Of course, his image of young stags with warm blood seems far removed from anything we might connect with the adolescent sweat boxes of today, but the metaphor is not so far-fetched. His prescription was a tried and tested mix of active participation, hard work, team work balanced by self-reliance, and, perhaps above all, temperance in all things. Baden-Powell pointed to rock climbing as the exemplary activity to instil these qualities. He exhorted teams of rutting stags to club together and support each other up some craggy edifice in order thereby to learn the lessons of life. They would reap ‘the moral effect of learning to face a difficulty, even when it looks like an impossibility, with calm determination and good cheer’. They would thereafter ‘face the difficulties of life in the same spirit, and by sticking to it and trying the different ways round or over the obstacle [they would] get there in the end’.

We don’t all have to go climb a rock, but the example is a good one. One way or another, young men must get a foothold on life.

On Becoming Manly, Part II

In the first part of this thread, I noted that the questions of when, how, and why to become a man are of pressing importance. I propose now to deal with each in turn, insofar as a humble blog such as this can treat such weighty subjects. I shall begin with the when of the matter, although I already find myself somewhat at a loss...

In 1746, or thereabouts, the Earl of Chesterfield wrote to his then eight-year-old son the following:

Everybody has ambition, of some kind or other, and is vexed when that ambition is disappointed: the difference is, that the ambition of silly people is a silly and mistaken ambition; and the ambition of people of sense is a right and commendable one. For instance; the ambition of a silly boy, of your age, would be to have fine clothes, and money to throw away in idle follies; which, you plainly see, would be no proofs of merit in him, but only of folly in his parents, in dressing him out like a jackanapes, and giving him money to play the fool with. Whereas a boy of good sense places his ambition in excelling other boys of his own age, and even older, in virtue and knowledge. His glory is in being known always to speak the truth, in showing good-nature and compassion, in learning quicker, and applying himself more than other boys. These are real proofs of merit in him, and consequently proper objects of ambition; and will acquire him a solid reputation and character. This holds true in men, as well as in boys… (Earl of Chesterfield, Letters to His Son, 1746-7).

The last clause holds the key. The spark of becoming manly occurs when the interests of boys and men begin to align. This entails that men know what their own interests are or should be, and recognise when boys become receptive to them. Fathers need to recognise their importance! We are wont to let boys be boys for rather too long, so that the vigorous, playful, unserious youth is never given a sober check, or a manful duty, until he is already physically a man. ‘Don’t let them grow up too fast’ is a phrase you’ll hear often. I would like to have parents add another clause to the imperative: ‘Don’t let them grow up too fast, but do let them grow up’. Before you know it, if you’re not careful, your boy will become just another undergraduate who does not know that it is rude to talk and chew gum in the library, with his girlfriend (rather than a book) sitting provocatively in his lap.

It is unthinkable, today, that a child of eight would receive such a letter from his father, extolling the virtues of a serious intellect, decency of character, and hard work. So when should it come? It seems to me that we rather underestimate the capacity of children, with school curricula increasingly spoon-feeding watered-down knowledge into the gaping mouths of perennial babes even up to the University years. Little room is given for initiative, for individual expression, for self-reliance, or for self-education. Since children are not given the responsibility to do anything, they do not learn that there are consequences to actions, and that they must take ownership of them. In most schools, there is no scope for building character at any point up to the age of eighteen. I suggest that, from the age of eleven or so, boys be given increasing freedom to act, within certain boundaries: to succeed and take the honour; to make mistakes and pay for them. There is no fixed point at which the boy of good sense will emerge from among his silly peers, but when he does he will likely serve as a positive example, if he can bear his exceptional status with courage. Becoming manly takes time, but at some point the process must begin.

On Fathers

The child is father to the man, or so they say, but what kind of man the child becomes depends on the kind of father he happens to have. In these days of ‘fathers for justice’ and paternity leave, does anyone stop to ask what justice for fathers might mean, or what fathers ought to do on their paid break from work? What is the role, the duty, of the father after his biological deed has been done? What should he be to his child, for childhood’s duration?

There were times when the answers to these questions were understood, responsibilities acknowledged. There are obvious differences according to time and place, but a common core of fatherliness emerges. Fathers were to be exemplars of virtue to their children, especially to their sons. They were to demonstrate, either through their actions or through their knowledge, the appropriate models of courage and physical prowess. A delicateness of touch and a gentleness of demeanour were to be married to a robustness of spirit when the moment commanded it, and sons were to understand that the former without the latter would not a man make. In many periods, the father was the moral teacher, ensuring the next generation of citizens understood what citizenship meant, and why it was worth fighting for. Some people have misunderstood this as all tiger shooting and rugby, but as we might expect, it was richer than that. The boy was to respect his father and treat his mother with the courtesy that his future wife might expect. Here, the father would lead by example, as also in the cases of piety, temperance, and fortitude. The son would learn from the father that in the family lay life’s treasure, and its sanctity would provide the motivation for its defence.

A way of life, in a free state, is perhaps reducible to this unit. To challenge a state so constructed is to challenge the core element of the family. A call to arms, therefore, would not be an appeal to an intrinsic masculine attraction to blood and guts, pomp and circumstance, and glory. On the contrary, the image of the thing to be defended – the gentleness of family life – will serve to ensure that the boy-becoming-man attends the roll call.

Justice for fathers in our world might then begin with the education of fathers in matters manly. While courage, strength and indefatigability have been watered down in our world, we have almost failed to notice that fidelity, courtesy, patience, civility, temperance and loyalty have virtually disappeared. If fathers do not know, or cannot pass on these things, then justice for certain children may well be to leave certain fathers out in the cold. But where these things can be salvaged, and where the correct spirit can be divined, then the least we can strive for is to allow fathers the freedom and the time to do their duty to their children. And if inspiration is required, a father may find it in the eyes of his new child. For surely in this, what is needed is implicitly understood.